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May 26, 2017

Magikarp Jump Review

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to have a fish tank in your smartphone? Well good news, cause the incredibly lame and amazingly brilliant Magikarp Jump is the app for you!

Magikarp Jump is the latest mobile game from The Pokémon Company, and it is totally free. Which is a good thing, cause there isn't much there to begin with. The game is a gloried fishbowl filled with, you guessed it, Magikarps. Of course, there are a ton of different variations of Magikarp for you to raise, like the standard old red Magikarp to the spotted black and white Calico Magikarp.

Everything you do in the game is to help level your JP, or Jump Points! It is a 'karp eat 'karp world out there, and the only way to ensure your 'karp is up to snuff is to make him or her a better jumper. This is done in two different ways, eating and training. But without the Rocky montage.

You can make food and training more effective by leveling up different types of food and styles of training with gold, which is earned by competing in jump battles and finding hidden treasures. At the end of every battle or training sequence, there is a small chance for a random encounter, which can be anything from an NPC giving you some gold or having a Voltorb explode, killing your Magikarp.

Don't worry though, going through generations of Magikarp is essentially the point of the game. Once a Magikarp reaches it's max level, it retires on top and swims about your pond, leaving you to train yet another Magikarp. As you train and win battles, you character levels up, increasing the max level you can level your Magikarp to. This in turn leads into... you guessed it, higher jumping.

If you stay on top of increasing the potency of your food and training exercises, any new generation of Magikarp you will be raising will blow through levels 1 through 10 pretty much instantly. There are 8 leagues to conquer with your jumping skills, and you don't even have to do anything. None of the training or the battles are a mini-game, but instead a canned cut scene with some simple math behind it.

If all of this sounds a little boring, it is because ultimately is. There is no grand evil to stop, no pending invasion, no Team Rocket stealing Pokémon, it is just simply a time waster. It has more in common with Neko Atsume than any other Pokémon game before it. What makes it so brilliant though, is it is done in a very tongue-in-cheek style. The Old Rod, which is the most basic and practically worthless fishing rod in the mainstream Pokémon games, is treated as a golden gift because it only fishes up Magikarp. Magikarp Jump takes the nearly 20 years of jokes and fun everyone made of Magikarp and distills it into a great time waster.